Before his untimely passing Christopher Hitchens developed quite a following. Hitchens, a one-time Trotskyite who remained a man of the left until his passing, was a brilliant writer and polemicist who pulled no punches. He was a student and admirer of George Orwell. His biographical essay about Orwell, “Why Orwell Matters” is an example of both the style of Hitchens’ writing and the substance of his thought. Though he was an admirer of Orwell he did not write a hagiography. He forthrightly examined what he considered to be Orwell’s strengths and weaknesses.
Less well-known is Christopher Hitchens’ brother, Peter, also an intellectual. (Christopher and Peter did not get along.) Peter Hitchens, a former Bolshevik takes aim at the authoritarian left relying in part on his past experience as a leftist. Like his brother, he gives no quarter and calls it the way he sees it. Take a look at the video below of Peter Hitchens being interviewed about the silencing of voices of dissent and the cancel culture, a culture that is rapidly spreading through American society.
JFB
